ʿAlī ibn Nāfiʿ, or Ziryāb, as he is better known, was undoubtedly the most famous musician of al-Andalus, yet there are many aspects of his life that are wrapped in mystery. The version of his life that first came to the attention of modern scholars is found in a text written in Cairo in the seventeenth century, nearly eight centuries after Ziryāb’s death, titled Nafḥ al-ṭīb min ghuṣn al-Andalus al-raṭīb wa-dhikr wazīrihā Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khaṭīb [The Scented Breeze from the Tender Branch of al-Andalus and the Biography of the Vizier Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khaṭīb] by Shihāb al-Dīn al-Maqqarī (1577–1632). Al-Maqqarī was originally from Tlemcen, in modern Algeria, lived for a number of years in Fez, but then traveled to Egypt and the Mashriq in 1617–18 and remained there for the rest of his life. Nafḥ al-ṭīb is a remarkable compilation of historical, biographical, and geographical material about al-Andalus divided into two distinct parts: the first treats the general history and culture of al-Andalus and the second is an extensive biography of Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khaṭīb, one of the major political and literary figures of the 14th century.
Pascual de Gayangos published an abridged English translation of the first half of al-Maqqarī’s work in London in 1840 as The History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Spain. In 1855–61 the Arabic text of the first half was edited and published in Leiden by Reinhart Dozy, then the full Arabic text was published at Bulaq (1862), then again in Cairo (1884–86), and more recently in Beirut in a new edition by Iḥsān ʿAbbās (1968). Although al-Maqqarī wrote this work in the early 17th century, he quotes many older works that have not survived, which has made it one of the key sources for the history of Muslim Spain. For many sections, including the biography of Ziryāb, al-Maqqarī relied heavily on Kitāb al-Muqtabis [The Quoter] by the Andalusi historian Ibn Ḥayyān (987–1085), itself a work that quoted extensively from earlier sources, hence its title. The section of al-Muqtabis that contains the biography of Ziryāb, however, has only recently come to light. It was first published in manuscript facsimile by Joaquin Vallvé-Bermejo in 1999, then in a Spanish translation by Federico Corriente and Maḥmūd ʿAlī Makkī in 2001, followed by an Arabic edition by Makkī in 2003.
Had Ibn Ḥayyān’s original text become available to modern readers first, and al-Maqqarī’s derivative text later, the world would probably have a rather different image of Ziryāb than the one that is in popular circulation now. Several reassessments of Ziryāb have been published in recent years drawing on Ibn Ḥayyān’s text and other sources, outlining the emergence of the mythic, larger-than-life image propagated by al-Maqqarī.1 In general, the earliest sources, those closest to the period when Ziryāb lived, treat him as a great musician, but they also speak of him derisively as a spoiled favorite of the Emir and a divisive character whose fits of pique led to the imprisonment of one member of the court and the forced exile of one of the senior statesmen and literary figures of Umayyad Cordoba, Yaḥyā ibn Ḥakam al-Bakrī, nicknamed ‘the Gazelle’ (Ar. al-ghazāl) for his good looks. Ibn Ḥayyān quotes several of these earlier sources in his Muqtabis, but he also quotes extensively from an anonymous work known as Kitāb Akhbār Ziryāb [The Book of Information about Ziryāb], which presents Ziryāb in a completely different manner.2 This work portrays him as not only the best musician of his day, but also as the arbiter in all matters of taste and court protocol, including dictating what color clothing members of the court should wear in different seasons, how food and drink should be served, as well as introducing a number of new dishes, the use of deodorant, and new hairstyles.3 In addition, this mysterious text portrays Ziryāb as a remarkable scholar (‘the wonder of his age’) versed in many different fields such as astronomy and geography, and having memorized 10,000 different songs. This extraordinary portrayal of Ziryāb as the central figure in the court of the Emir ʿAbd al-Raḥmān II (r. 822–852) was further aggrandized by al-Maqqarī, and later made its way into modern scholarship, both western and Arab.
One of the major differences between the biography of Ziryāb in Ibn Ḥayyān’s Muqtabis and that in al-Maqqarī’s Nafḥ al-ṭīb, is that the former is a multivocal text that includes quotations from works attributed to the historian ʿIsā Aḥmad al-Rāzī (d. 980), the historian and religious scholar Abū l-Walīd ibn al-Faraḍī (962–1013), the poet ʿUbāda ibn Māʾ al-Samāʾ (b. late 10th century), as well as the anonymous Kitāb Akhbār Ziryāb, and additional passages, perhaps from oral sources, introduced simply with “Some have mentioned …” (dhakarū) or “People have said …” (qālū), along with an occasional comment by the author himself. Several of these accounts contradict each other and Ibn Ḥayyān leaves the reader to decide which version is most likely to be true. Al-Maqqarī, on the other hand, suppressed these conflicting voices, chose a single version of each anecdote (invariably the one that portrays Ziryāb in the best light), and wove the whole into a smooth, anonymous narrative. The text by Ibn Ḥayyān translated here thus allows modern readers to hear some of those erased voices, get a sense of the differing portrayals of Ziryāb’s character, and in general, see a more realistic, less hagiographic, image of a man who was without any doubt a truly remarkable musician and who, in a process that lasted several centuries, was eventually transformed into an icon of Umayyad glory.
All of the sources that deal with Ziryāb, from his earliest mention in the Taʾrīkh Baghdād of Ibn Abī Ṭāhir Ṭayfūr (819–893), through works by al-Ṭabarī (839–923), Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih (860–940), Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī (897–967), Ibn al-Qūṭiyya (d. 977), al-Khushanī (d. 981?), Ibn al-Ṭaḥḥān (d. after 1057), al-Ḥumaydī (1029–95), al-Ḍabbī (1155–1203), Ibn Saʿīd al-Maghribī (1213–86), al-Tīfāshī (d. 1253), Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406), and al-Maqqarī (c. 1577–1632), without exception, stress his genius as a musician.4 And yet, strangely, not one of these sources speaks of a song composed by Ziryāb, which sets his portrayal very much apart from the Arabic biographical tradition of musicians. In other biographies of musicians (such as the one of Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī included in this volume) one of the primary elements in narrating a musician’s life is recording a number of their songs, often with indications of the musical modes and rhythms. This is a very peculiar lacuna.
Ibn Ḥayyān’s text, translated here, moves from one source to another, usually indicated clearly by a phrase such as, “I read in a book by so-and-so …” or “Some people have said …” He also uses a common technique for marking where one quoted passage ends and where another passage from the same work begins by inserting: “He said …” (qāla), which is translated here as “He [also] said …” to indicate that this is a quote from a different place in the same work. In a handful of places, however, it is not entirely clear who or which source is being cited, which is indicated with bracketed question marks. In general, I have tried to create a text that can be read smoothly in English yet remains true to the sense of the Arabic, and have provided in footnotes a variety of contextualizing information where this seemed advisable. The Spanish translation by Corriente and al-Makkī has been helpful, but a number of the musical details have been mistranslated; my suggestions for alternative readings and a handful of corrections have been included in the footnotes. I have in most cases followed the emendations suggested by al-Makkī in his Arabic edition, particularly where letters, words, and phrases are illegible in the original manuscript due to rot or worm holes, clearly visible in the facsimile edition cited above.
The early sources all agree that Ziryāb was black – not just dark-skinned, but black (several sources include phrases such as ‘jet black’) – that he was trained in Baghdad, and that he eventually made his way to al-Andalus in the year 822, the year in which the Emir al-Ḥakam I ibn Hishām died and his son ʿAbd al-Raḥmān II ascended to the throne. Beyond those basic facts, however, there is little consensus. Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih says that he was a slave [ʿabd] trained by Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī who performed occasionally for Hārūn al-Rashīd in Baghdad, then performed in the court of the Aghlabid ruler Ziyādat Allāh II (r. 817–38), where, after a performance that displeased his patron, he was beaten and driven out, eventually landing in Cordoba. Ibn al-Qūṭiyya, however, says that he was a musician who performed in the court of Muḥammad al-Amīn (r. 809–13), son of Hārūn al-Rashīd, and fled to al-Andalus after al-Amīn was killed during the bloody civil war with his half-brother al-Maʾmūn. The anonymous Kitāb Akhbār Ziryāb, however, says that he was the student of Isḥāq al-Mawṣilī, son of Ibrāhim, who took him to perform privately one single time before the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd. He is said to have performed so well that his jealous teacher threatened to kill him if he did not leave Baghdad immediately, which he did, and then made his way to Cordoba, where he received an extravagant welcome, despite the fact that, according to this same account, he was as yet a completely unknown singer who had never performed publicly.5
In modern times Ziryāb is often portrayed as having been much more than a mere musician: he is credited with a long list of innovations in court protocol. These details, however, are found only in one single, highly enigmatic, source – the anonymous Kitāb Akhbār Ziryāb. Some of these accounts may actually have occurred (such as replacing metal goblets with glass drinkware, the serving of food on leather platters rather than on wood, or the introduction of new types of cooking), but we have no way of verifying Ziryāb’s role in these changes. Other anecdotes, however, seem more likely to be mythic, such as Ziryāb’s addition of a fifth string to the lute. Early Arab lutes did indeed have four strings, named (from lowest to highest in pitch) bamm, mathlath, mathnā and zīr. Using basic fingering (that is, without sliding the hand up the neck of the instrument), this left the instrument two notes short of completing two octaves. So, when a fifth string was added, it was added alongside the zīr and usually referred to as al-zir al-ḥādd (the high-pitched zīr), simply al-ḥādd (the high-pitched), or al-khāmis (the fifth), which served the purpose of extending the range of the instrument. The rather strange account of Ziryāb’s fifth string, however, focuses on the need for an additional string to represent the soul in order to complement the existing four colored strings that represented the four humors of the body (yellow gall, red blood, black bile, and white phlegm). He is said to have added it to the middle of the instrument, between the second and third strings, which (at least according to this description) would not have served any musical purpose.
Another oft-repeated detail is that when Ziryāb arrived in al-Andalus the people there, men and women, wore their hair parted in the middle hanging down loosely on both sides. When Ziryāb arrived, he wore his hair with a fringe (bangs) hanging over his forehead, cut straight across, with side curls hanging down on both sides, and the rest of his hair tucked behind his ears. This impressed the Arabs of the court as so elegant that they adopted this coiffure for their servants and slaves. Al-Maqqarī conveniently eliminated this last phrase from his version, however, which gave rise to the myth that the Arab nobles coiffed their own hair in imitation of Ziryāb’s style (a highly unlikely proposition given the status of a court musician vis-à-vis the nobles of the realm).
Ziryāb, part man and part myth, occupies a remarkable place in the history of al-Andalus, and in particular, the history of Andalusi music. Although he is often said to have laid the foundations of the Andalusi musical traditions performed in the Arabic- and Hebrew-speaking Middle East, this simply is not true. The vast majority of the repertory of modern Andalusi traditions consists of stanzaic muwashshaḥ and zajal songs, genres that did not come into existence until several generations after Ziryāb’s lifetime. Regardless of the many spurious claims about him, Ziryāb is certainly one of the most fascinating, and mysterious, figures in the history of Arab music.
1 Notes on the Translation
Ibn Ḥayyān’s attributions to earlier texts and oral sources have been set in bold-face. I have supplied the name Ibn Ḥayyān where the author inserts his own first-person comments, and have marked in brackets where the narrative returns to an earlier text, for example: [Returning to al-Rāzī]. The lengthy quotations from the anonymous Kitāb akhbār Ziryāb are set with narrower margins to maintain the distinction from the main text.
One of the constant conundrums of translating medieval texts about music is the flexibility of some of the most common terms: laḥn, for example, is often used to mean ‘melody,’ but some authors use it to mean a ‘melodic mode’; naghma (pl. nagham) can refer to individual notes, or can, on occasion, refer to ‘melodies’ or ‘tunes.’ The term ṭarīqa (pl. ṭarāʾiq) is particularly troublesome since it can simply mean ‘style’ or ‘technique’; a type or genre of song, such as nashīd or hazaj; a song’s melodic mode, rhythm, or both; or even (though not in this text) the characteristic ‘flow’ or ‘path’ of a melodic mode, referred to in later works as sayr (movement, motion, course). A nawba (colloquial nūba) can refer to a musician’s turn performing in a gathering, a series of songs strung together in a performance, or (particularly in later centuries), a compound ‘suite-form’ in which the songs are carefully organized by melodic mode and/or rhythm. One unique musical phrase in this text is al-ghināʾ al-ʿazīz shaʾnuhu, which appears to refer to ‘noble’ or ‘courtly’ music. Where it is not clear precisely what is meant by these terms in the text, this has been noted.
Given Ziryāb’s fame and the many myths that surround him, the annotations provided here are meant to make this text accessible to a broad readership, including those not specialized in medieval Iberian or Middle Eastern history.
See Carl Davila, “Fixing a Misbegotten Biography: Ziryāb in the Mediterranean World,” al-Masāq 21, 2 (2009): 121–36, and The Andalusian Music of Morocco: al-Āla: history, society and text (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2013); as well as Dwight F. Reynolds, “Al-Maqqarī’s Ziryāb: The Making of a Myth,” Middle Eastern Literatures, Vol. 11, no. 2 (2008): 155–168, “Ziryāb in the Aghlabid Court,” in The Aghlabids and their Neighbors: Art and Material Culture in 9th-century North Africa (Leiden: E. J. Brill Arts and Archaeology of the Islamic World series, 2017): 144–162, and The Musical Heritage of al-Andalus (London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2021): 43–85.
See Reynolds Musical Heritage, pp. 75–77, for a detailed discussion of the probable identity of the author of this work.
For a discussion of these and other elements of Ziryāb’s biography, see Alexandra Bill, “Entre importations orientales et practiques locales, la musique en al-Andalus, est-elle un art omeyyade?” Anales de Historia del Arte, Vol. 22, Núm. Especial II (2012): 91–100.
For analysis and citations to these texts, see Reynolds, Musical Heritage, Chapt. 4.
For a more detailed review of the discrepancies and contradictions in the early sources, see Carl Davila “Misbegotten Biography” and Andalusian Music, and Reynolds “al-Maqqarī’s Ziryāb,” “Ziryāb in the Aghlabid Court,” and Musical Heritage.